Ruth: The Foreigner in My Family Tree

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. In the Hebrew Bible it is one of the Writings, though some early lists attached it to Judges.

When: It is set in the time of the judges, before the kings. When it was written is disputed. Many scholars place it after the exile, in the Persian period. Others place it earlier, under the kings.

Where it fits: Set in the days of the judges (Ruth 1:1), three generations before King David (Ruth 4:17). Written much later, perhaps after the exile. Christian Bibles print it between Judges and 1 Samuel.

Where I quote it: Never. Matthew names Ruth in my family tree (Matthew 1:5).

If you only read three chapters: It has only four. Read all of it.

Words to Know

Moabite — from Moab, the country across the Dead Sea from Judah. The Law said no Moabite could ever join the assembly of the LORD.

Gleaning — gathering the grain the harvesters leave behind. The Law required farmers to leave some for the poor.

Redeemer — in Hebrew go’el, the relative whose duty was to buy back family land, or a family member, that had been lost to debt.

Kindness — in Hebrew hesed, loyal kindness that goes beyond what is owed. It is the key word of this book.

The Book in Brief

Ruth is a short story in four chapters.

In chapter 1, a famine drives a man from Bethlehem, his wife Naomi and their two sons to Moab. The man dies. The sons marry Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth, and then the sons die too. Naomi decides to go home and urges her daughters-in-law to stay. Orpah goes back. Ruth refuses to leave her, and the two women reach Bethlehem as the barley harvest begins.

In chapter 2, Ruth gleans in the fields of Boaz, a wealthy relative of Naomi’s dead husband. He is kind to her and makes sure she gathers plenty.

In chapter 3, Naomi sends Ruth at night to the threshing floor where Boaz sleeps. Ruth lies down at his feet and asks him to spread his cloak over her as her near kinsman. He agrees, but a closer relative has the first right.

In chapter 4, Boaz meets that relative at the town gate. The man gives up his right, and Boaz buys the family land and marries Ruth. They have a son, Obed. The book ends with a family list running from Perez, a son of Judah, to Obed’s grandson, David.

There was a famine in Bethlehem, the town where Matthew and Luke both say I was born. Its name means house of bread, and there was no bread.

So a man named Elimelech took his wife Naomi and their two sons across the Jordan to Moab. Then Elimelech died. The sons married Moabite women, and about ten years later both sons died too.

Naomi was left with nothing. A widow with no sons, in a foreign country, had no land, no income and no one to protect her. She told her daughters-in-law to go home to their own mothers.

One of them, Orpah, went. The other, Ruth, would not.

Where you go

What Ruth says to Naomi is one of the most famous promises ever written:

Where you go, I will go; and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die (Ruth 1:16–17).

You may have heard it read at a wedding. It was not said to a husband. It was said by a young widow to her mother-in-law, an old woman with nothing to offer her. Ruth was choosing poverty and exile in a strange country, out of loyalty.

When they reach Bethlehem, the women of the town recognize Naomi, and she says, Don’t call me Naomi, which means pleasant. Call me Mara, which means bitter (Ruth 1:20).

Gleaning

To eat, Ruth goes into the fields to glean, picking up the stalks the reapers drop.

That was the Law at work. When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field, neither shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest … You shall leave them for the poor and for the foreigner (Leviticus 19:9–10).

Ruth was both. She was poor, and she was a foreigner.

The field belongs to a relative of Naomi’s named Boaz. He notices her. He tells his young men not to touch her, and then tells them to pull some stalks out of the bundles on purpose and leave them for her to find (Ruth 2:9, 16).

That is a man who keeps the law of gleaning and then goes past it. The book’s word for that is hesed, loyal kindness beyond what is required.

The threshing floor

In chapter 3, Naomi sends Ruth to the threshing floor at night, where Boaz is sleeping after the harvest. Ruth lies down at his feet. When he wakes, she asks him to spread his cloak over her, which means marry me, and she calls him a near kinsman (Ruth 3:9). The Hebrew word is go’el, a redeemer.

A redeemer, a go’el, was the relative who had the duty to buy back family land that had been sold for debt (Leviticus 25:25). Boaz does it. He redeems Elimelech’s land, and he marries Ruth, at the town gate, in front of the elders (Ruth 4:9–10).

That word, redeemer, began as a word about land and debt. It meant the family member who got you back what you had lost.

Go deeperThe sandal at the gate

Chapter 4 joins two old family duties that are easy to mix up.

The first is the duty of the redeemer. When a man lost his land through debt, his nearest relative was to buy it back (Leviticus 25:25). Jeremiah does exactly this, centuries later, when his cousin offers him a field at Anathoth, for the right of redemption is yours to buy it (Jeremiah 32:7). He pays, and the deeds are sealed in a clay jar.

The second is the duty of a brother-in-law. If a man died without a son, his brother was to marry the widow, and their first son would carry on the dead man’s name. If the brother refused, the widow pulled his sandal off his foot in front of the elders and spat in his face (Deuteronomy 25:5–10). The people at the gate even bless Boaz by recalling an older story of this kind, Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah (Ruth 4:12). Tamar had to trick her father-in-law into giving her the son she was owed (Genesis 38).

In Ruth the two duties are tied together. Boaz tells the nearer relative that whoever buys the field must also take Ruth, to raise up the name of the dead on his inheritance (Ruth 4:5). The man backs away, lest I endanger my own inheritance (Ruth 4:6). But Boaz is not a brother-in-law, and no one spits. The man takes off his own sandal, and the book stops to explain that this was the custom in former time in Israel (Ruth 4:7).

Scholars still argue about how these customs worked, and whether the book describes a law of its own day or a custom already fading when it was written.¹ The direction of the story is clear. The relative who had the first right to the land would not take the widow with it. The man who took both did more than he had to.

The women name the child

Ruth and Boaz have a son. And then the book does something that happens nowhere else in the scriptures. The women of the town give the child his name. They call him Obed (Ruth 4:17).

Then the story’s last line tells you who he was. He is the father of Jesse, the father of David (Ruth 4:17).

The foreign widow who gleaned in the fields was the great-grandmother of Israel’s greatest king.

The law that kept her out

Now here is why this little book matters so much.

Deuteronomy says: An Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter into the LORD’s assembly; even to the tenth generation shall no one belonging to them enter into the LORD’s assembly forever (Deuteronomy 23:3).

And after the exile, the leaders who rebuilt Jerusalem enforced that law hard. Ezra made the men of Judah send away their foreign wives, and their children with them (Ezra 10). In Nehemiah’s day the law against Moabites was read aloud, and Nehemiah cursed the men who had married women from Ashdod, Ammon and Moab, and pulled out their hair (Nehemiah 13:1–3, 23–27).

If Ruth was written in that period, as many scholars think, then it is a quiet answer to those men.² It does not argue. It tells you a story about a Moabite woman whose loyalty puts the Israelites around her to shame, and then it tells you that King David came from her.

The scriptures I grew up on held both. The law that kept the Moabite out, and the story of the Moabite who could not be kept out.

Go deeperHow the rabbis let Ruth in

The rabbis who came after me loved this book, and they had to answer the question it raises. If no Moabite may ever enter the assembly, how could David, whose great-grandmother was a Moabite, be king?

Their answer was to read the law word by word. Deuteronomy says Moabite, a masculine word. So, they ruled, the law bars Moabite men, not Moabite women. The Mishnah, the first great book of rabbinic law, written down around the year 200, puts it simply: Ammonite and Moabite men are barred forever, but their women are permitted at once.³

The Talmud tells a story about it. In Saul’s day, it says, a man named Doeg argued that David could not be accepted because of his Moabite blood. Then David’s nephew Amasa stood up with his sword strapped on and declared that anyone who disagreed would be run through, because he had the ruling from the court of the prophet Samuel himself: “An Ammonite, but not an Ammonitess; a Moabite, but not a Moabitess.”⁴ The story itself admits that the question was not an easy one.

Jewish communities still read Ruth aloud every year at the Feast of Weeks, the harvest festival that Christians know as Pentecost. The custom is first recorded in a small book of rabbinic rules compiled many centuries after me.⁵ The story is set during the barley and wheat harvests (Ruth 1:22; 2:23). And a teacher named Rabbi Zeira said why the scroll was written at all. It has nothing to say about clean and unclean, or about what is forbidden and what is allowed. It was written to teach how great is the reward of those who do kindness.⁶

My family tree

Matthew names Ruth in my family tree (Matthew 1:5). She is one of four women he includes before my mother, and every one of them is an outsider or a scandal: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and the wife of Uriah the Hittite.

You should also know that Luke gives me a different family tree, and the two do not agree on most of the names between David and my father. Matthew traces my line through Solomon and Luke traces it through another son of David, Nathan. Even my grandfather has a different name in each.⁷ People have tried for centuries to reconcile them. They have never fully succeeded.

But Matthew wanted Ruth in it, and he was right to want her there.

When I said, Many will come from the east and the west, and will sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 8:11), I was speaking about a Gentile army officer. I could have been speaking about Ruth.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Deuteronomy 23:3, then Ruth 4:13–17.

You will find: a law that no Moabite may join the assembly, and a Moabite woman who became David’s great-grandmother.

Then read Leviticus 19:9–10 and Ruth 2:15–16. Watch Boaz go past what the law required.

The Short Version

• Ruth is the story of a Moabite widow who would not abandon her mother-in-law.
• It shows the law of gleaning working, and a man who goes beyond what the law required.
• Redeemer began as a word about buying back land lost to debt.
• The Law said no Moabite could ever belong. Ruth became King David’s great-grandmother.
• Matthew put her in my family tree, which does not match the one in Luke.